For quite some time — coinciding with me nervously and vaguely muttering “freelancer” whenever anyone asked what I did for a job — I had a Patreon account where I shared recipes and interminable snippets of poetry and manuscripts to a supportive group of subscribers. I’ve since closed it down, now that I have a real live job, but one of these for-your-eyes-only recipes was a lemon curd made with preserved lemons that I was inordinately fond of. I had of late imagined a salted lemon ripple ice cream flowing with that very curd, but couldn’t find any preserved lemons within a walkable radius. No mere velleity, the thought of lemon and salt together lingered, and, nudged along by the flavours of the Palestinian dessert knafeh, the idea morphed deliciously into these Lemon, Feta, and Pistachio cookies.

It took me a few goes to get them right — I was 1000% certain of the perfection of the flavour combination, but the texture of the cookies kept me guessing, which is why it’s been a while since I last blogged. Food blogging for the love of it alone is not unlike making a pavlova, it requires perfect conditions and specific resources to make something that everyone has seen before a thousand times anyway. Currently, my full-time job leaves me about twelve minutes per week of energy and photography-friendly daylight hours to blog. Meanwhile, last year when I was in the quagmires of terminal unemployment, I had all the time in the world but not a spare dime to my name to spend on recipes. So eventually, after winnowing away at these spectacular cookies and realising that I needed to move to a more shortbread-y framework, I did the same as last time and used a perfect Nigella recipe as the starting point before going dramatically off-piste with my ideas.

Although I would recommend being secure in your convictions and the palates of those around you before committing to making these, the flavour is not entirely chimerical; suggesting the bold tanginess of a cheesecake more than anything else, with that lilting descant of lemon nimbly taking the feta over the fence from savoury to sweet. The almost-dissolving shortbread is the perfect, muffling foil for all that boisterous flavour, keeping it in check and holding it together with its reassuringly familiar texture. In fact, the flavours are so rapturously blissful, so in your face yet subtly woven together, that I’m tempted to go full circle, inspiration-wise, and make a lemon and feta cheesecake ice cream. But, one thing at a time: these cookies are magnificent, so let’s think about them for a while longer.

Making your life easier is the way these cookies are composed for the oven; all at once in a tin, pressed out and scored and dotted with steam-vent holes, to be separated later like the borders of old-timey perforated printing paper. Though the jewel-encrusted effect of the pistachios is pleasing to behold, don’t skip this step thinking it’s just for aesthetics — that last, dazzling drizzle of lemony icing is the final high-kick of citrus these need to shine, and the floral butteriness of the pistachios echoes that of the shortbread and creamy feta. Those dense, yielding cubes of feta are interspersed throughout for sudden rushes of saltiness, any remnant of savouriness completely brought down into submission while still retaining something of itself. I won’t lie, I am incredibly pleased with both this idea and this recipe, and you’ll already know whether this is a cookie for your palate — I certainly hope, for your sake, that it is. But if you’re really feeling led a merry dance here, you could leave out the feta and still have a perfectly pleasant, if less thrilling, lemon shortbread.

For more recipes that straddle the salty-sweet or salty-sour divide, I recommend this Avocado, Labaneh, and Preserved Lemon Spread; my Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Agrodolce and Feta; and this Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Snacking Cake.

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PS: If you’re after a way to support a local charity who are doing their level best to get in on the ground and provide aid to people in Palestine, despite nonstop setbacks and ongoing atrocities, ReliefAid are doing amazing work to reach people in Gaza and I urge you to support them if you can.

Lemon Feta Pistachio Cookies

Unusual in theory perhaps, but the more you eat the more they make monumental sense: abundantly lemony, salty, and sweet, buffered by the gentle melting shortbread around it. Also, they’re simpler to make than this long recipe would suggest; I took a circuitous route to explain the baking process. I drew from Nigella Lawson’s shortbread recipe in Forever Summer for the base ingredients; and was inspired by the flavours of Palestinian knafeh, but this is otherwise a recipe by myself.

• 200g very soft butter
• 100g icing sugar
• 100g cornflour
• zest of one lemon
• 200g block of creamy feta, fridge-cold
• 200g plain flour

To finish

• 50g icing sugar
• 1-2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice, from the one you zested earlier
• 70g shelled pistachios

1: Set your oven to 160C/320F and line a 25cm square tin with a sheet of baking paper, leaving plenty of overhang on either side.

2: In a large bowl, beat the 200g butter till acquiescent — just using a wooden spoon is fine, but feel free to use something more electric if that’s easier. Sieve in the 100g icing sugar and slowly stir to incorporate the easily-airborne sugar particles, then beat more quickly until the mixture is light and fluffy.

3: Sieve in the 100g cornflour, and stir to combine, followed by the zest of the lemon. Now, remove the block of feta from the fridge and drain off any liquid. Roughly dice into cubes of about 1cm, and gently stir these cubes into the shortbread mixture, followed by the 200g flour. Stir together to form a shaggy, crumbly mixture — the feta cubes will appear to stick out alarmingly but it will all come together.

4: Don’t overwork the dough at this point, or you’ll end up with tough shortbread. Once the flour is mostly absorbed into the butter, tip this crumbly mixture into your 25cm square tin, and press out the dough into an even layer with the back of a spoon. You can also, as I did, fold the paper overhang over the dough and press down on it. The shortbread dough doesn’t have to be perfectly smooth and flat, but try to make sure no enormous craters or lumps interrupt the surface.

5: Make two horizontal, parallel slices all the way across through the dough in the tin, then slice at even parallel intervals vertically — that is, instead of slicing or rolling these cookies, you’re baking them as one giant shortbread pangea, but slicing where the cookies would — and will — be, means you can easily run the knife along those border lines again once baked and cooled and they’ll separate easily and neatly into rectangles. Next, take a fork and stab twice on each rectangle, which allows steam to escape and for the shortbread to cook evenly.

6: Refrigerate the cookie dough in its tin for ten minutes. Then, place the tin in the oven and bake for 22 minutes, at which point the slab of shortbread should be a very pale golden. Remove the tin from the oven and let it sit, cooling, for twenty minutes. Run your knife through those same lines you forged to separate the shortbreads, then lift the cookies out carefully — it may be easier to lift them all out at once using the paper overhang as handles — and transfer them to a wire rack to cool further.

7: Finally, for the icing, stir together the 50g icing sugar and enough fresh-squeezed lemon juice to make a thickish paste that still drips from a lifted spoon. Roughly chop the 70g pistachios into small pieces of green rubble. Using a teaspoon, drip a little of the lemony icing over one end of the cooled shortbreads, and sprinkle over a little of the chopped pistachios on each.

Makes 18, though can stretch further depending on how you slice it.

Notes:

• I used Bouton D’or cow’s milk feta here — you want something sharp and creamy and not too expensive or boldly funky.
• I also used salted butter as I do for everything, as that’s how it comes here and I’m used to the taste. If you regularly bake with unsalted butter then you can just keep doing that.

music lately

Goddess on a Hiway by Mercury Rev, this song makes me feel absolutely sodding miserable if I’m not and lightly commiserated with if I am, couldn’t possibly improve on that. I was astonished to find out they were American after being strongly convinced this entire time that they were British, their music bears a distinct sound of slow fluoridisation uptake and brick bedsits.

Gone Daddy Gone by Violent Femmes, the kind of sinister drive-thru rock’n’roll that reminds us a misspent youth knows no age limit. To say nothing of its excellent use of the glockenspiel!

Meadowlark, from The Baker’s Wife, as performed by Lea Salonga. Her voice is so glassily clear and crisp, the sound of a thousand crystals twinkling, and this song — which always makes me cry — is a wonderful showcase for her, with its multi-faceted fakeout endings building to higher and higher heights of frantic emotion.

Jewel, by Blonde Readhead. What if I just lie down and howl like a crestfallen goose, then what!